


kookaburra sitting on the electric wire

by facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf)



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Australia, Gen, S2M40 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 09:16:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5451413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegandalf/pseuds/facingthenorthwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out Owen isn’t Australian at all – only pretending. He can only last so long before the jig is up. [End of season 2 spoilers, oddly enough.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	kookaburra sitting on the electric wire

“Owen,” that new doctor says, handing him the packet of marshmallows going around the campfire. She was banging the old doctor, wasn’t she? “You’re Australian, right? I did a gap year in Australia — whereabouts are you from?”

Shit. Shit shit shit. “Um, Sydney,” he says. That’s, like, the capital of Australia, right? He can totally wing that.

“I did my gap year at Sydney! I must admit I spent most of it in Newtown, though,” she said, and he ate a marshmallow just so he didn’t have to answer. Was Newtown bad? Why would she be phrasing it like that? “I loved it, though you got the weirdest things in A&E down there. One guy got a Yowie stuck— well, the weirdest things.” What was a Yowie? He keeps chewing even though he swallowed the marshmallow half a sentence ago. Paula keeps talking, so he judges that a success. “I was there through swooping season and we’d have to wear sunglasses on the back of our head and still run like hell,” she says, taking her marshmallow out of the fire and blowing it out before eating it. “It was easier just not to leave the building.”

“Why?” he asks, and the confused look Paula gives him in return makes his insides turn cold.

“The magpies, of course. You didn’t have them in your area? I thought they were all over.”

“Oh, haha,” he says, his laughter shaky. “Yeah, those. I mean, it’s really cold then so you wouldn’t want to go outside much, would you?”

The look Paula gives him next is even worse, and he considers perhaps just never speaking again. “It’s in September. You sure you’re Australian?”

Later, he will say it was the exhaustion that broke him so easily. They’d done a supply run all the way out to the city that morning and run into a pack of zoms on the way home, so he was utterly zonked.

“I, uh…” He suddenly remembers his mum telling him he had no poker face when he was tired. He tries to compose one anyway.

“You’re…you’re not, are you?” The way she says it isn’t accusatory, just amused. Somehow, because the gods hate him, this is when other people decide to join in.

“Not what?” Jack asks, taking the packet of marshmallows off him.

“Not Australian,” Paula says.

Jack looks confused for a moment, turning from Paula to Owen and back again before saying, “Nah, mate, Owen’s totally Australian. He says he grew up on a kangaroo ranch.”

“Jack,” says Eugene, and Owen wonders why you can never bloody have one without the other. “Kangaroos are a pest in Australia. Kangaroo ranches don’t exist.”

What a giant tosser, Owen thinks. Just a straight up impossibly large tosser.

“But Owen says they…they train them for boxing,” Jack says, and despite his stone cold heart, Owen feels like he’s let him down.

“Where are you actually from?” Paula asks. She still doesn’t even seem angry at him. Weird.

“Australia!” he says, a last-ditch effort to save his skin. Paula unknowingly does a spot-on impression of his mum when he said he ate the fruit in his lunchbox, honest. He capitulates. “…Birmingham.”

“Your accent was kind of dodgy,” Eugene says, and Owen considers punching him in the face.

“You mean…you mean all that stuff about the kangaroo ranch was false? Even the bit where you rode them to drive off the emus with shotguns?” Jack looks so _heartbroken_ , like Owen had told him Santa didn’t exist or something.

Eugene snorts and tries to turn his laughter into a cough.

“I’ve…I’ve never even seen a koala,” Owen confesses. “I burn easily in the sun and…I don’t like the ocean.” Now that he’s started, it seems easier to just get it all off his chest at once. “Cold beer is bloody weird, I can’t name a single Australian cricketer, and I’ve never seen that…that show my Australian mate talked about, the one where the boy pisses on a tree and gets knocked up.”

“Round the Twist,” Paula supplies helpfully. “When I was down there my Australian friends made me watch all three seasons.”

“My mate made me try vegemite once and I think I nearly died,” Owen says, using his marshmallow stick to draw pointless lines in the dirt. “He took me to this Australian bar he found in the city and I asked for a Fosters and almost got punched in the face.”

“There there,” Paula says, patting him on the shoulder. “I couldn’t stomach Vegemite either, though it gets much better if you just scrape it on like that jar has to feed the entire city.”

“But…but why would you do it?” Jack says. “Why would you pretend to be Australian?”

“To pick up chicks — they like foreign guys, don’t they? It worked well enough before the apocalypse, thought it might work here too.” He glances over at Jody, but she’s engrossed in conversation with someone he doesn’t recognise.

Paula was trying not to laugh, but he could see her shoulders shaking in the twilight.

“The accent’s bloody impossible, though,” he grumbles. “I don’t even know how their vowels work.”

“Clearly,” Eugene says. If he punches him now, at least he’ll get swift medical attention, right?

“Maybe Jody’ll like you a bit more if you’re from Birmingham,” Jack says. He seems to have recovered from the betrayal.

“You should go tell her now,” Eugene suggests, slinging an arm around Jack and grinning. “Either her opinion of you will improve, or we’ll all get a show when she kicks you in the balls.”

Owen has a sense of self-preservation, thank you very much, so he doesn’t take the bait. When Eugene shouts over to Jody anyway, though, he runs and doesn’t look back.

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted December 2013. The concept is Andrea's fault. the fic originally linked to a youtube video, since taken down and without a replacement, of the Round the Twist episode S03E01 "The Big Burp". And yes, that is literally the plot of the episode.
> 
> the title is a line from a parody of an australian children's song, which goes: kookaburra sitting on the electric wire/jumping up and down with his tail on fire/jump kookaburra jump kookaburra/how hot your tail must be
> 
> explanations of the australiana for the uninitiated:  
> sydney is not the capital of australia. that would be canberra. sydney is the biggest city, though.  
> newtown is a suburb near Sydney University, full of hipsters and queer people and queer hipsters. what i've heard of san francisco seems to be like newtown.  
> yowies are a type of chocolate that's like a kinder surprise but milk chocolate and in the shape of a bunyip.  
> swooping season is the magpie nesting season when magpies attack humans who go anywhere near their nests. it's brutal. the youtube videos are hilarious, though.  
> Fosters is a brand of beer that tastes like piss. I mean, all beer tastes like piss, imo, but even people who like beer hate Fosters.


End file.
